Akunin

The very first time I had seen this movie was a couple of years ago. Still, it made a strong impression on me as if I were watching it a few days ago.

This love story is doomed from the beginning. A young man who only wants to be loved instead of being a laughing stock and a young woman brave enough to love and accept the true colors of her final choice.

Is one rewarded or punished if after becoming a sinner we meet a saint? If so, is it because we are given the second chance or are we shown what was the right thing to do? To risk everything you have and you have known for and let your destiny to take over? Staying true to yourself is the bravest thing you can do.

This stunning movie is all about mixed emotions. What is your final though - it's up to you.

You won't regret.

This movie perfectly illustrated how the modern world cheapens everything meaningful by making it transactional and soulless. Young women leave their rural communities, their parents and their homes to go live in the city and become consumers and interchangeable cogs in the machine that doesn't care about them. Courtship, relationships and love have been reduced to meeting people on dating sites, like ordering something from Amazon, with infinite replacements instantly available, should there be a small flaw or the temptation of an upgrade. And yet, deep down everyone is yearning for something realer. For the way it used to be. That's why despite the higher living standards of today, people are the most lonely and unhappy.

A very nice film.

Villain lost out at the 2011 Japan Academy Awards on the big prizes to Confessions. While Directing, Script and Best Picture went the way of the bleak, hyper-stylised Takako Matsu flick, all four acting awards were scooped by Villain. The reason for that split is abundantly clear.

Villain centres on lonely Yuichi who drives through the night and occasionally meets women through online dating sites. The forum for their meeting suggests each is as flawed as the other. When one assignation goes very badly indeed, something dark in Yuichi is unleashed. He then gets a message from another female via the site, and so two life-changing events take place within seconds of each other.

Villain explores complex questions of moral responsibility, the hypocrisy of social condemnation, and the extent of individual responsibility. The direction is workmanlike, and the framing rarely gets beyond a TV aesthetic. But the script is naturalistic and offers genuine insight, peaking in the father of the victim (Akira Emoto) revealing that hateful people are the way they are because they are too cowardly to risk caring for someone. Emoto and Kirin Kiki excel as the elder generation struggling to come to terms with the ugly turn the world has taken. Krini Kiki, faced with extortion, goes from bewilderment to fear to resignation all by changes of expression and never a word spoken. But it is the two young leads, Eri Fukatsu and Satoshi Tsumabuki, who truly excel here. Fukatsu especially shows a young woman capable of living with the emptiness inside her, until meeting someone who can fill it proves too much to bear. The cathartic peak of the film is her scene of self-awareness. Tsumabaki also gets to test his range at the end, but in a much more chilling and wonderfully ambiguous direction.

There are good guys and bad guys here, as you'd expect given the content, but they are not where you expect to find them. There is a murderer, but we are less convinced of our stance towards him than we are to the press-pack parasites, conman doctor, self-absorbed mother, and shallow and narcissistic university undergrad. A bus driver strangely earns our cheers, and is perhaps the only unambiguous 'good' character in the film. In a time where heinous crimes have become everyday and our ability to relate with one another seems fragmented and brutalised, the causes may not always be where the lazy self-appointed moral guardians in the media and corridors of power suggest they lie.

Villain is a slow build to its message, a slightly meandering survey of its theme, and the pacing can frustrate over the flabby 139 minutes. But it is worth sticking with for the questions it forces you to reflect on at the end, and the consummate acting. One of the best films to come out of Japan this century.

This was quite a moving film for me. I watched it starting at midnight lying in bed from a laptop sitting on my belly, and I was riveted throughout the 140 minutes. That's how engaging it was. It is one of those well directed realistic slice-of-life movies that depict flawed human beings and how their desires, ambitions, and inner demons combine with the forces around them to create a fateful drama that is tragic, ironic, or otherwise very moving. For me, this kind of real life stories, if done right, have so much greater impact than the fantasy movies. You are indirectly but in a very powerful way experiencing a fundamental facet of this life, while peeking into the souls of your fellow humans.

Villain deals with the concept of good and evil, love and all the intricate workings in peoples' fate it entails, and the flaws and limitations in all of us. Blown away by the film, I also read the book. My conclusion is that the movie is better than the book. Sang Il Lee created a wonderful work out of a novel that is good but not earth-shattering.

I was a bit disappointed with the final turn of events toward the end, but it's still a quiet, heavy impact story. And the final scene of the two protagonists gazing at the rising sun with tears in their eyes is one of the best scenes I've seen all my life. All in all, it's a great experience. I recommend it to anyone, especially those who love realistic, moving films.

God, I wanted to rave about this film. 'Villain', billed as a gritty thriller from Japan, tells us in its plot synopsis that this is about the murder of a young woman and the search for the killer. I disagree completely. Even the genre in which its advertisers have pigeon holed it is incorrect. This is not a thriller – please don't enter the cinema expecting nerve jangling suspense. What we have here is the potential for a great film – and for the most part, what we are shown is excellent.

So I'll start with the positives, for when 'Villain' is good, it's incredible! 'Villain' does not follow the search for the killer at all – it largely follows the killer himself. There are a lot of characters in this movie, and a myriad of sub plots (which, incidentally, isn't beneficial – but more of that later). It is, as I saw it, a very slow, patient, observant film, which instead of reaching for cheap thrills and jump moments, is actually brave enough to step back and do something which very few films of this kind ever take the time to do: it peers into the misery and loneliness of its central characters, and their disillusionment concerning the immorality of the people around them. There is much cruelty in this film, and sharp prickles of nervousness and fear – but it is not a nasty story.

Undoubtedly the most successful plot line running through the film is, luckily, the one given the most attention: this is the relationship that is formed between Yuichi, our young murderer, and Mitsuyo, a lonely woman who works long hours selling suits and lodges with her sister and her sister's boyfriend. Their first meeting is embarrassing and ends horrifically – Yuichi, still consumed by guilt and anger, makes assumptions about Mitsuyo which he will later regret. Mitsuyo is desperate and understanding, and as the film goes on, we begin to understand just how much these two need each other.

Intercut with this is the storyline following the family of the murdered girl. This also is incredibly successful in the way in which it shows the grief of her parents – how they must come to terms with who their daughter really was, how they fight and turn on each other, and finally come to sad realisations, not only about themselves and their child, but about the people around her and them, and the corrosive cynicism and immorality of a new generation. Fair enough, on paper, that might sound a little pretentious, but unlike the majority of trashy whodunits that Hollywood churn out on an almost weekly basis, this is a film with much to say. It is deeply sad, and in many scenes, you can almost feel the director's sorrow and anger.

Less successful are plots involving Yuichi's grandmother and how she is cruelly scammed by her 'doctor' (this seems like a touch too far on the 'oh look at what a terrible society we live in' front), and the ending, although well meaning, is miscalculated. The way in which the director chooses to bring the relationship between Yuichi and Mitsuyo to a close seems like a strange choice – it might have worked, but nothing we have seen has led us to expect it, and as it comes so out of the blue, it is hard to believe in. It is, quite frankly, a bit of a cheat – a wrong footing that casts a somewhat distorted light on all the searing emotional honesty we have seen previous to that.

The film, however good some of the individual parts that make it up may be, is ultimately flawed. Clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, it's about half an hour too long, and although the cinematography generally is exceptional (there's an inspired shot in which a flashback begins as the camera zooms into the pupil of a fish eye that will take the breath away from any film buff), the editing can sometimes be a little choppy. If only they had stuck with the love story at the movie's centre and the storyline involving the family of the dead girl, keeping the scenes with her father and the immoral young man that his daughter was smitten with, this would undoubtedly be one of the best films of the year. As it stands, 'Villain' is a good film – and despite its flaws, it's definitely worth the watch. I, for one, liked it very much.